Firefox Monitor Will Check If User Accounts Have Been Compromised

Firefox says they are testing a new feature that will allow you to easily check if your email address has been involved in a data breach and provide recommendations on what to do to protect your personal data. The new feature, which has a strong Australian connection, will initially be deployed to 250,000 users, most of whom will be from the United States, before becoming widely available.

Firefox Monitor has been created in partnership with HaveIBeenPwned.com (HIBP). This is a simple online tool that lets you enter your email address and see whether an online account using that address has been compromised at some point. HIBP was created by Australian security researcher Troy Hunt.

As well as HIBP, Firefox is working with Cloudflare so any data that is entered by users is not shared outside Firefox. It will do this by employing APIs that hash queries so no plain-text data is exchanged between Firefox and HIBP. There’s more detail on how that works on the Mozilla Security blog.

Hunt discusses the partnership on his blog. I knew his database of compromised addresses was large but I was surprised to see it has reached 3.1 billion unique addresses. It’s well worth checking if your addresses are there and signing up for alerts in case an email address of yours pops up in a new breach.

In order to access the new feature, Firefox says you’ll need to download and install the latest version of Firefox Quantum.


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